Volume 10 Number 1

Winter 2001

Feature: Romania after the 2000 Elections

Romania’s First Postcommunist Decade: From Iliescu to Iliescu
     Vladimir Tismaneanu and Gail Kligman

On December 10, 2000, Ion Iliescu was again elected president of Romania. The results of the two rounds of presidential and parliamentary voting, in November and December 2000, came as a surprise to those unaware of the sharp decline in popularity of both then-president Emil Constantinescu and the coalition that helped him win the presidency in November 1996. But certain aspects of these elections could not have been predicted even by the most knowledgeable—and pessimistic—pundits. Notable among these was the formidable advance of the populist and xenophobic Greater Romania Party (GRP) led by Corneliu Vadim Tudor.

To understand the return to power of Ion Iliescu and his Party for Social Democracy in Romania (PDSR), a review of the key features of Romania’s pre-1989 dictatorship, and of Romania’s bumpy and convoluted post-communist itinerary is in order. History does matter and Leninist legacies have importantly influenced the choices of political elites since the collapse of communism. In Romania, from 1965 to 1989 political power was extremely personalized; it was wholly focused on and sustained by the extreme personality cult of the party and state leader, Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena. The secret police (Securitate), for all practical purposes the direct and personal instrument of Ceausescu’s dictatorship, played a pernicious role in social and political life. (This distinguished the Securitate from other East European security services, including the GDR’s Stasi, which was subordinated to the party’s collective leadership and to the secret-police boss, Erich Mielke, who implemented Politburo directives.) Moreover, by the 1980s, the stagnation of Romania’s economy was pronounced. The continuation of an economic strategy that deepened the country’s industrial misdevelopment (to use Ken Jowitt’s inspired term), combined with enormous hardships imposed on the population by Ceausescu’s erratic policies, resulted in countrywide malaise, cynicism, and despair, creating an explosive climate. Indeed, during 1989, Romania presented a revolutionary situation: those at the top were increasingly isolated and unable to use effectively their authoritarian methods of coercion and mobilization; those at the bottom were increasingly alienated and beyond control. In short, Romania was ripe for revolutionary action. The events in the other Soviet bloc countries, catalyzed by Gorbachev’s reforms, further weakened Ceausescu’s grip on power.1

By the end of 1989, it had also become clear that the Romanian regime would meet its demise in a manner that would differ from the fate of its Hungarian or Polish counterparts. There was no enlightened, reform-oriented faction within Romania’s party elite. The disaffected party and Securitate cadres were isolated, fearful, and, with very few exceptions, unable to articulate a minimal alternative program to Ceausescu’s disastrous path. The Romanian Communist Party, proportionately one of the largest in the world, was in essence a paralyzed body with no collective leadership, no inner party life, and no genuine feedback from lower to higher echelons. The party apparatus experienced a profound political and ideological crisis, especially as a consequence of Gorbachev’s unsettling changes. For many years, Ceausescu and his coterie had relied on an ideological claim of autonomy vis-à-vis the neo-Stalinist Soviet Union. However, once Gorbachev had engaged in radical de-Stalinization, Ceausescu’s quasi-independent foreign policy ceased to appeal to the West. For Romanians, the conducator’s firebrand rhetoric of national independence and sovereignty and his unrelenting opposition to Moscow, came to represent less an expression of patriotic dignity and more a frantic, obstinate effort by an ailing neo-Stalinist leader (and regime) to resist the Kremlin’s liberalizing "new course." By the end of his rule, Ceausescu was isolated in the East and West, reviled by his population, and deeply resented among the humiliated party organization. With very few exceptions within the Securitate and the military, there were no genuine Ceausescu loyalists.

Nothing similar can be claimed, however, with respect to the Leninist regime, the socialist welfare state, and the leading role of the Communist Party. Those who despised, even hated, Ceausescu and his tyranny, were not necessarily believers in liberal, Western-style democratic values and practices. Such a one was Ion Iliescu, a former Moscow-educated apparatchik, a Communist Party secretary in charge of ideology who had been criticized by Ceausescu in the early 1970s for "intellectualist" deviation from Lenin’s, read Ceausescu’s, vision of Marxist orthodoxy.

Ceausescu’s regime was overthrown by a series of popular uprisings occurring between December 16 and 22, 1989, first in Timisoara, then in Bucharest. In the end, the dictator and his wife fled from the Communist Party building by helicopter, and, following an unusual flight, were captured by the army. They were sentenced to death by a kangaroo court (self-designated as an "extraordinary military tribunal") and executed by firing squad, on Christmas 1989. From that moment on, power was concentrated in the hands of a self-appointed ruling body named the National Salvation Front Council (NSF). Iliescu, until then the director of the Technical Publishing House in Bucharest, became the head of this new formation. Political parties, movements, and civic associations mushroomed overnight. Critical intellectuals, previously silent, became publicly vocal and called for rapid decommunization. They castigated the Iliescu-led NSF for its effort to stay in power, accusing it of having hijacked the revolution and establishing a "cryptocommunist" regime. Confrontation between anticommunist and postcommunist groups and movements (some of which considered themselves to be political parties) escalated, and even turned violent, as was the case during the miners’ raid on Bucharest in June 1990. Presidential elections were held in 1990 and 1992, both of which Iliescu won. During this period, a split occurred in the NSF between the more-reform-oriented group headed by Petre Roman (prime minister between 1990 and 1991) and Iliescu’s supporters. The former eventually created the Democratic Party (DP); the latter eventually renamed themselves the Party of Social Democracy in Romania (PSDR). The rupture between the former allies, Roman and Iliescu, was significant and resulted in Roman’s rapprochement with the anticommunist coalition.

The emergent anticommunist coalition was dominated by a historical party, the resurrected Christian Democratic–National Peasant’s Party (CD–NPP). The "right" (as opposed to Iliescu’s "left") initially pursued a confrontational strategy. Later, realizing the failure of extraparliamentary opposition, the right formed its own umbrella coalition consisting of an array of political parties and civic movements. The most powerful personality in this coalition was Corneliu Coposu, a lawyer and former political prisoner who had spent 17 years in communist jails. (His death in 1995 was perceived by many in Romania as the end of a stage in a moral civil war.2) Coposu himself selected the democratic opposition’s presidential candidate for the 1992 elections: Emil Constantinescu, rector of the University of Bucharest and a geology professor.

In 1996, Constantinescu conducted an aggressive campaign against Iliescu, criticizing the absence of crucial economic reforms, endemic corruption, the lack of transparency—particularly with regard to the revolution of 1989—and the reluctance to deal with such issues as property restitution and citizens’ access to secret-police files. Constantinescu won the 1996 election primarily because of mass discontent with PSDR’s failure to generate an economic recovery and because of the widespread perception that the so-called democratic opposition had the political will and competence to engage in serious reform. During the campaign, Constantinescu resorted to various populist techniques, including promises of immediate and tangible changes, the reshuffling of elites, and the appointment of a new class of managers. (He boasted of 15,000 well-trained specialists ready to supervise necessary economic and political reforms.) Many considered Constantinescu, who had not been officially affiliated with any political party after 1990, to be the candidate of civil society (a term poorly understood and often misused in Romania). He enjoyed strong support from the independent media; even the traditionally pro-Iliescu daily Adevarul (The truth) supported Constantinescu.

The elections of 1996 represented a real watershed in postcommunist Romanian history; they inaugurated a pattern of political alternation in governance and allowed the anticommunist forces to participate fully and legitimately in the political process. PSDR conceded defeat and became the most important opposition group. As mentioned above, in his campaign, Constantinescu had promised rapid economic recovery, the eradication of political and economic corruption, strengthening of judicial and legal guarantees of citizens’ rights, a reckoning with the communist past including truth about the revolution, the restructuring of the secret services, and a firm pro-Western foreign policy orientation. Had Constantinescu succeeded in fulfilling his election pledges even minimally, it is unlikely that Iliescu would have made such a spectacular comeback in 2000. Constantinescu did not seem to realize that he was brought to power not because of his personal charisma or past merits but rather as an expression of discontent with the ineffectiveness and political scandals of the preceding Iliescu governments. Many Romanians viewed Constantinescu, the Democratic Convention (DC, the coalition he represented), and a new government as a better option than the obsolete, collectivist, and statist policies of Iliescu and his allies. They thought they had voted for change, for a democratic rupture with the old order. There was near euphoria during the early period of Constantinescu’s presidency. But then the president seemed to begin to believe in his own predestined mandate, as it were, engaging in Byzantine games with the political parties and surrounding himself with a circle of advisers recruited more on the basis of personal friendships and loyalties than, as he had claimed would be the case, on competence.

The team that came to power in 1996 professed itself committed to breaking with the past. What they lacked was competence and coherence.3 This became increasingly evident after the defeat of the first prime minister, Victor Ciorbea, and his attempt to institute a program of economic and political reforms in 1997. Ciorbea’s reforms, as well as those initiated by his successor, Radu Vasile, failed primarily because of the lack of support from members of the ruling coalition. For example, DP, led by former prime minister Petre Roman, often acted like an internal opposition within the governing coalition itself. In the end, Ciorbea was forced to resign.

On a more positive note, the post-1996 governing coalition included the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR), which helped to temper ethnic friction in the country. In foreign policy, Constantinescu was adamantly pro-Western. However, he refused to recognize that Romania had little chance of being integrated into the first wave of NATO enlargement.4 Instead of admitting that inclusion into NATO would be a long and difficult process, Constantinescu engaged in and encouraged a national pro-NATO campaign, cultivating among Romanians the belief that their country was likely to be invited to apply for admission together with Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic.

And so, while focusing on foreign policy and enjoying the image of a major international player, the president seemingly neglected what was happening internally in Romania: for example, DC’s popular support was declining, divisions within the ruling coalition were emerging or had solidified, PSDR had regrouped around Iliescu, and a large segment of the population had become increasingly frustrated with plummeting living standards. By 1999, it appeared clear that Iliescu would run again for president and that he had a more than credible chance of winning the elections in 2000. All this notwithstanding, Constantinescu and his associates did not engage in a lucid political reassessment and mobilization. Instead, they continued to blame the media, the secret services, corrupt economic tycoons, and virtually everyone else except themselves and their own poor performance and failings. On various occasions, the president expressed disgust with and contempt for the country’s political class. In addition, major corruption scandals affected individuals in his immediate entourage, exposing the blatant failure of his much-trumpeted 1997 anticorruption campaign. Unlike PSDR, DC refused to draw serious conclusions from the deepening crisis and indulged in what may be considered self-aggrandizing fantasies. The chasm between the president and civic associations, many of which had originally promoted him, widened. CD–NPP, the ruling coalition’s central pillar, was plagued by rivalries, factionalism, and conflicts among its prominent personalities and between the generations. The two prime ministers associated with CD–NPP (Victor Ciorbea and Radu Vasile) were successively sacrificed by the president and their own party to placate the coalition’s internal combatants. At least Constantinescu’s last prime minister, Mugur Isarescu, was a nonpolitical personality, a technocrat who had been appointed by Iliescu in the early 1990s as governor of the National Bank.

By the summer of 2000, it was evident that the PSDR would score a major victory in the parliamentary elections, and that Constantinescu’s chances of reelection were slim. Instead of choosing to fight and confront Iliescu, the president announced his retreat from politics—quite the opposite of his pledge, when he came to power, to inaugurate a new era in Romanian politics. Enamored of his own image, Constantinescu had become increasingly convinced that Romanians had failed him, rather than vice versa. The populist promises of the 1996 campaign were not realized. Trust in the president, political parties, and parliament was very low, while the popularity of the ultranationalist GRP led by Corneliu Vadim Tudor, and that of the notorious mayor of Cluj-Napoca, Gheorghe Funar, was gathering momentum. It was precisely at this point that Constantinescu left his supporters dumbfounded by announcing that he was abandoning them. His choice for a DC/CD–NPP candidate was Mugur Isarescu, a selection he apparently had made without having consulted Isarescu himself. (Isarescu was unaffiliated with any party.) At the same time, the National Liberal Party (NLP), long embittered by its subordinate treatment within DC, broke with CD–NPP and decided to continue on its own. Its presidential candidate was Teodor Stolojan, an economist who had served as Iliescu’s prime minister before the 1992 elections.

In 1996, at Coposu’s behest, the Romanian democratic forces had presented Constantinescu as the sole candidate of a seemingly united opposition. By 2000, rivalries and jealousies within DC had given rise to three candidates from its own ranks—Isarescu, Stolojan, and Petre Roman—as well as the DAHR (or Hungarian) candidate, Gyorgy Frunda. Of the former three, none could convincingly claim a resolute break with Iliescu’s pre-1996 regime, and none had the political clout necessary to convince Romanians that he was essentially different from Iliescu. Furthermore, Iliescu conducted a skillful campaign and ably disassociated himself from the nationalist themes he had promoted in previous years. "European integration" was as much present in the PSDR campaign as in that of any of its rivals.

What happened in the 2000 elections and why?
The return of Ion Iliescu to the presidency and PSDR’s reascendance in government may be viewed as Romania’s "velvet restoration" (to borrow Adam Michnik’s concept5). It is by no means the return of the big-party, quasi-authoritarian, neocommunist regime that followed the collapse of Ceausescu’s rule in December 1989. Iliescu and his supporters learned important lessons in the years after his first terms in office. The 1996 electoral change constituted an incomplete rupture, to be sure, but it nonetheless created a political culture of alternating governance that most Romanians had never experienced during their lifetimes. As a result, the November 1996 transformation may be seen as an incomplete yet genuine breakthrough in the same sense that the December 1989 upheaval was a real yet unfinished revolution. The victors of 1996 lost the elections of 2000 quite pathetically. That, in and of itself, is not so unusual if we consider the fate of other center-right coalitions in, for example, Hungary or Poland. The primary cause of DC’s defeat was the inconsequential and faltering nature of the reforms initiated but not forcefully implemented by the three governments during the Constantinescu presidency. The 2000 elections confirmed both the demise of the old-fashioned, ideologically ossified CD–NPP and the rise of a more dynamic, modern NLP. (The recent appointment of Andrei Marga, rector of the University of Babes-Bolyai in Cluj, and minister of education in Constantinescu’s government, to head CD–NPP may contribute to the party’s reinvigoration, as well as to its intellectual rejuvenation.)

The recent elections also signaled a shift to the left by the Romanian electorate, where the main beneficiary turned out to be PSDR. In the first round of the presidential election, neither the DC, nor NLP, or DAHR candidates managed to obtain the number of votes needed to qualify them for the runoff. To the astonishment and despair of many Romanians, the second round of voting meant choosing between a moderate quasi-populist, postcommunist leader, Ion Iliescu, and a rabid nationalist, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, who in many respects may be likened to Russia’s Vladimir Zhirinovski. In view of these circumstances, it is no wonder that longtime opponents and critics of both Iliescu and the PSDR issued appeals calling for Romanians to oppose Vadim Tudor’s irresponsible policies, and thus, by implication, endorsing Iliescu. Ironically, the specter of Vadim Tudor becoming Romania’s president and the threat of an open dictatorship induced public figures such as the former dissident Doinea Cornea, and others with similar pedigrees to back Iliescu’s election. At the same time, some suggested that the choice between Iliescu and Vadim was not a choice between a greater and lesser evil, but between equal if different opponents of democracy. Such a claim is unfounded. Whatever one thinks of Iliescu, it is indisputable that he accepted the results of the 1996 elections and more or less fairly steered the parliamentary opposition throughout the subsequent four years. During his trip to Washington in September 2000, Iliescu went out of his way to persuade US officials and analysts that his commitment to Euro-Atlantic values and institutions was firm, and that any alliance with Vadim Tudor and his party was out of the question.

Since the second round of voting, from which Iliescu readily emerged victorious, many Romanians nonetheless remain perplexed by the solid defeat of the victors of 1996 and the exhaustion of DC’s electoral appeal.6 A partial explanation lies in the heterogeneous and centrifugal nature of the post-1996 ruling coalition. Petre Roman’s DP and the DC’s parties and movements were indeed strange bedfellows, with different agendas, historical memories, interests, and aspirations. Instead of recognizing this unwieldy situation and considering preterm elections early in his presidency, Constantinescu accepted successive DP ultimatums and abandoned various of his loyal supporters, such as former prime minister Victor Ciorbea. Moreover, political parties in Romania, especially among DC members, have been marked by considerable ideological incoherence, where the personal power of individuals and personal relations count for more than shared principles or policies. The result has been an absence of predictable and consistent patterns of political conduct. And inevitably, demagoguery and reciprocal accusations among coalition partners have stirred contempt on the part of the electorate for parliamentary and party institutions. As PSDR vice-chairman Adrian Nastase remarked to Vladimir Tismaneanu in September 1999: "We don’t need to do very much. The DC is itself paving the way for our victory." The vote for Iliescu—and for Vadim Tudor—was fundamentally a vote rooted in dissatisfaction and frustration with the ruling coalition and its failure to deliver even minimally on what it had promised.

Furthermore, Emil Constantinescu’s public comportment, especially after 1998, was perceived by many as increasingly arrogant. Isolated from the media, he believed he was deeply misunderstood, even sabotaged by ill-willed "enemies." The president and his immediate entourage seemed to wrap themselves in a cocoon of self-pity and self-aggrandizement. This accounts, at least in part, for what political columnist Andrei Cornea correctly described as the "end without glory" of Constantinescu’s presidency.7 To this may be added his failure to confront unflinchingly the "forces of the old" (in the phrase of Michael Shafir). Instead, Constantinescu favored only superficial transformations of the secret services. The president did encourage some forms of retroactive political justice, such as the initiation of trials against two important military figures involved in the Timisoara massacre of December 1989 (the generals Mihai Chitac and Victor Atanasie Stanculescu). But on the whole, Constantinescu’s policies and positions came to be assessed negatively. The overall popular sentiment was one of widespread frustration with an underperforming government. Rhetoric was plentiful. But the tangible effects of the much-trumpeted campaigns for NATO integration, eradication of corruption, moral and legal reconstruction, and—perhaps most significantly for many voters—for a positive economic turnaround, were, at best, meager.

Romanian peronismo?
The real surprise of the 2000 elections was not the victory of Iliescu and PSDR, but, rather, the stunning rise of Vadim Tudor and his GRP. A combination of antisystem nationalist caudillo and self-indulgent jester, Vadim Tudor managed to transform a marginal political organization into a major opposition party that now controls one-fifth of Romania’s parliament and many of its specialized committees. Vadim Tudor is not the Polish-Canadian-Peruvian Stanislaw Tyminski who emerged to challenge Lech Walesa in the runoff of the Polish elections in the early 1990s. He is not an unknown adventurer appearing out of nowhere. Vadim Tudor is an avowed exponent of forces nostalgic for a regime of draconian authority, xenophobia, and opposition to democratic values and tolerance. Hungarophobic and anti-Semitic, Corneliu Vadim Tudor played the nationalist card (although in a more subdued fashion than previously), adding to this the anticorruption and antiestablishment themes that resonated with the problems of contemporary everyday life. As a result, he obtained for GRP the highest percentage of votes of any extremist party in post–World War Two Europe. His rhetoric and charisma appealed to the disaffected among Romania’s youth who knew little about Vadim Tudor’s past as a Ceausescu court poet, as well as to many of those in western Romania who had voted overwhelmingly for Constantinescu in 1996 and were fed up with DC’s blunders and poor performance. Ironically, Iliescu and PSDR had contributed to Vadim Tudor’s eventual success by their refusal to endorse numerous proposals in parliament to lift Vadim Tudor’s immunity and put him on trial for countless calumnies against almost every prominent Romanian political and intellectual personage.

Vadim Tudor’s party is not a "traditional" extreme-right party nor is it a reincarnation of the mystical-revolutionary Iron Guard, the fascist movement present in Romania during the interwar period. GRP is neither "right" nor "left" but rather locates itself in an elusive amalgamation of nostalgia for communist and fascist ideals, hostility to modernity and diversity, and a militaristic, some would say phallocentric, cult of the nation (racially defined), associated with a Greater Romania movement and with a supreme leader (conducator). Vadim Tudor’s idols are indicative of his mindset: the medieval prince Vlad Tepes (the Impaler); the pro-Nazi dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu; and the communist nationalist leader, Nicolae Ceausescu. One of the secrets to Vadim Tudor’s ascent was the delay of any serious, searching public discussion of the country’s Stalinist and fascist experiences. Historical ignorance and amnesia have been Vadim Tudor’s strongest allies in his reinvention as the embodiment of Romanianness.8 For many Romanians, there is nothing to be regretted in their authoritarian historical experiences, and no reason to repent for participation in and complicity with the repressive and terrorist actions of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. In the same vein, as historian Sorin Antohi has noted, many of those who voted for Iliescu and Vadim Tudor (in other words, for the two personalities directly linked to the pre-1989 past) have come to associate "communism" with that short-lived period in the 1970s of relative liberalization and better living standards.9 Against the much-resented nouveaux riches, "kleptocrats," and the media elite, Vadim Tudor promised a ruthless campaign of punishment: "I will rule the country with the machine gun," he ominously proclaimed.

Also bearing some responsibility is the media, which created a climate in which Tudor’s inflammatory rhetoric of castigation appeared normal. Amateurism, a frantic search for sensational topics, and the trivializing of important moral and political issues have all contributed to the degradation of public discourse.10 Throughout the summer of 2000, when most political personalities were enjoying summer vacations at the Black Sea, Vadim Tudor was the star of widely watched political and cultural television shows. This proved a godsend for the self-appointed "sword of popular justice," who could engage in endless diatribes against the vacationing ruling elite, including the leadership of PSDR. For many, Vadim Tudor represented the true (if otherwise unheard) voice of the people, the voice of the descamisados.

While the angry prophet, Vadim Tudor, ranted on behalf of the "wretched of Romania," civil-society groups continued to champion abstract, often nebulous, ideals rather than organizing themselves and society against PSDR’s moderate, and Vadim Tudor’s radical, forms of populism. Never was the gap between the pro-Western intelligentsia and the general electorate so wide as in the fall of 2000. The self-identified democratic forces lacked a coherent vision, strategy, and tactics. They appeared disoriented, confused, and self-destructive. For instance, NLP engaged in behind-the-scenes arrangements that ended up undoing the ruling coalition. (Although this should have occurred long before, the timing was anything but politically advantageous.) Eventually, NLP became a supporter of PSDR, albeit without officially joining the new postelection cabinet headed by Adrian Nastase. The anti-Iliescu challengers running in the 2000 elections were little more than that: colorless anti-Iliescu candidates (save Vadim Tudor), who were lacking in compelling political credentials and unable to persuade the electorate they were any different from either the PSDR leader or the increasingly disliked Constantinescu. Modest economic growth in 2000 (which the CD–NPP/DC candidate and then– prime minister Mugur Isarescu often invoked) did not yield any significant improvement in the abysmal living conditions of half of the population.

Under these circumstances, Iliescu was generally viewed as the seasoned statesman, a politically rational and reasonable bulwark against Vadim Tudor’s erratic populist adventurism. Voting for Iliescu, it seemed, was the only feasible choice if one wanted to exercise his or her civic right to vote.

The future
What about Romania’s future? A minority left-wing government will need the support of the center-right parties in order to pass legislation and push through necessary structural micro- and macroeconomic reforms. A clear generation gap exists within PSDR: Iliescu and his close friends (Oliviu Gherman or Nicolae Vacaroiu) are in many respects anachronisms, in that their political socialization and much of their lives were influenced strongly by Khruschevite and Gorbachevite illusions about the reformability of Leninist regimes. Adrian Nastase, now prime minister, was born in 1950, and represents a different age and cultural group. It is likely that PSDR, far from being a completely homogeneous entity, will evolve and even split along these lines: on the one hand, the traditionalists who do not fully embrace the West, the market, or intellectuals (and who, in certain respects, share some of GRP’s nostalgia for authoritarian rule and nationalist perspectives); and, on the other, PSDR’s younger, pro-West, promarket, and prointellectual modernizers. (Here, we note that Adrian Severin, a former foreign minister in Victor Ciorbea’s first post-1996 cabinet, later joined PSDR and is now a member of parliament.)

Similarly, the old CD–NPP has ceased to exist, and a new party will most likely emerge with a younger, more dynamic leadership than that which had directed the party throughout the 1990s. The legitimacy of CD–NPP’s old guard had been rooted primarily in its having suffered in communist jails. As mentioned, the recent appointment of Andrei Marga as party head suggests that CD–NPP will be reconstituted. He, like Nastase and others of their generation and political orientation, are now in leadership positions. Hence, there is reason to believe that the politics of the 1990s may be reconfigured. If reforms are seriously pursued, Romania may indeed move forward, thereby diminishing much of Vadim Tudor’s popular support and transforming his stunning rise in the 2000 presidential election into an ephemeral phenomenon. If, however, corruption, procrastination, and a seeming uninterest on the part of the political elite in the broader population’s plight continue to plague Romania’s ongoing transformation, then authoritarian populism has a future in Romania. Ion Iliescu is not Belarus’s Alyaksandr Lukashenka or Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, but his successor may be.

Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of politics at the University of Maryland (College Park), editor of East European Politics and Societies, and author of numerous books, including Fantasies of Salvation (Princeton University Press, 1998) and Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (forthcoming, University of California Press). Gail Kligman is professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is on the editorial board of numerous journals, including East European Politics and Societies, and is the author of numerous books, most recently, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (University of California Press, 1998) and, with Susan Gal, The Politics of Gender after Socialism (Princeton University Press, 2000).

NOTES
1. See Katherine Verdery and Gail Kligman, "Romania after Ceausescu: Post-Communist Communism," in Eastern Europe in Revolution, ed. Ivo Banac (Ithaca and London Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 117–47; Vladimir Tismaneanu, "Romanian Exceptionalism? Democracy, Ethnocracy, and Uncertain Pluralism in Post-Ceausescu Romania," in Politics, Power and the Struggle for Democracy in South-East Europe, ed. Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 403–50.
2. For more on Coposu and his role in the political cleavages in post-1990 Romania, see Vladimir Tismaneanu and Mircea Mihaies, Incet, spre Europe (Iasi and Bucharest: Polirom, 2000).
3. This was a theme addressed by the Romanian political scientist and analyst, Dorel Sandor, in various public presentations.
4. The reasons for Romania’s initial ineligibility are many. In addition to economic instability, there was also the unmodernized state of the military and the persistence of old cadres in key positions in the different secret services.
5. See Adam Michnik, "The Velvet Restoration," in The Revolutions of 1989, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 244–51.
6. See the contributions to the discussion organized on the theme "Why did we lose the elections?", in 22, no. 51 (December 19–25, 2000), pp. 8–9, a weekly published by the Group for Social Dialogue, Bucharest.
7. See Andrei Cornea, "Constantinescu—final fara glorie," 22 no. 52 (December 27, 2000–January 3, 2001), pp. 1, 3.
8. On Tudor as champion of officially sponsored nationalism in Ceausescu’s Romania, see Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).
9. See "Romania dupa 11 ani—o radiografie," an interview with Sorin Antohi by Rodica Palade, 22, no. 1 (January 4–10, 2001), pp. 6–9.
10. This theme is explored in depth by Peter Gross in his forthcoming book Unperfect Evolutions: Eastern European Media, Civil Society, Political Culture, and Democratization.

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